Virgin Galactic unveils SpaceShipTwo; Plans open architecture spaceship, Jan 24, 2008

Virgin Galactic on Wednesday unveiled designs for SpaceShipTwo and the WhiteKnightTwo, two vehicles that are designed to usher in private spaceflight. The technology behind the system will have an open architecture “like Linux,” said officials.

Over the last several years open source has grown in stature and maturity, becoming more worthy in the eyes of corporate buyers and investors. Everyone could point to Red Hat, which dominates the Linux operating system space, as the poster child for open source but few other “pure” open source companies rose up to that level.

At Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer tried to disabuse the thousands of IT executives attending the conference of two notions: Windows software is hopelessly insecure and Linux offers a better TCO (total cost of ownership) than Windows

The presidential debates are not yet in gear, but the debate about open sourcing Java continues. At the O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2004, Simon Phipps, chief technology evangelist for Sun, admitted (not for the first time) that Java isn't open enough. "We are keen for Java to learn from the way open source software can create freedom. We are squarely on track to be a full peer member of the open source community," Phipps told me.